Cultural Amnesia (45 page)

JOSEF GOEBBELS

Josef Goebbels (1897–1945) began as a professional student (he was enrolled
at eight different universities) and would-be literary figure. He ended as a corpse in the Reich Chancellery, having achieved, in the interim, the distinction of being minister of public
enlightenment and propaganda in the Nazi government, and a ranking second only to Goering’s among those closest to Hitler. During the war, after Goering’s prestige waned, Goebbels
moved up to the vacant second spot, and was effectively in charge of the country in the final period when its most terrible crimes were being carried out: the idea that Himmler acted without
Goebbels’s knowledge does not bear examination. A crippled schizophrenic, Goebbels was easy to make fun of at the time by those safely out of his reach. Now that we all are, we should
perhaps try to remember that as a young man he was interested in the arts, loved the movies, saw the power of advertising, studied the techniques of publicity, and favoured the idea of
politics as a spectacular drama. A lot of what we think normal now, he thought of first: so we need to be very sure that we have a different slant on it. Even his anti-Semitism began as an
intellectual pose: he took it up while he was on a scholarship.

Since Stalingrad, even the smallest military success has been
denied us. On the other hand, our political chances have hugely increased, as you know.

—JOSEF GOEBBELS, QUOTED IN
HIS OFFICE ON JANUARY 25, 1944, BY WILFRED VON OVEN IN
Mit Goebbels bis zum Ende
, VOL. 1, P. 178

A
MONG THE
NAZIS
who got away to Argentina after the war was the future author of what would be the world’s funniest book, if it did not take your breath away so thoroughly that laughter is
impossible. After a notable beginning as a war correspondent reporting Nazi victories in Poland, the West, the Balkans and in Russia, Wilfred von Oven spent the late part of the war as press
secretary, personal assistant and tireless sounding board for Goebbels. At the Propaganda Ministry in Berlin, Goebbels would think aloud by the hour while von Oven wrote it all down. Von Oven was
on the spot when Goebbels microfilmed his personal diaries and made them safe for posterity.

But the papers in von Oven’s own keeping were even more precious. In Argentina von Oven typed up
his reminiscences as if they constituted a world historical document, which indeed they did, and still do. They were published in two volumes by Dürer-Verlag in Buenos Aires in 1949. My set
dates from 1950, when the work achieved a second printing. (They had an awful lot of coffee in Brazil, and they had an awful lot of Nazis in Argentina.) I bought the set second-hand in that same
city fifty years later. The twin volumes were in good shape: bound in yellow cardboard with orange cloth spines, they had never sprung their hinges, and the paper, though of low quality, had not
yet begun to crumble. I took my find to my favourite café in San Telmo, sat down to read, and almost instantly realized that I was in the presence of an unrivalled comic masterpiece. In
Mel Brooks’s
The Produc ers
, the berserk playwright in the helmet admires Hitler as one psycho admires another. But von Oven is funnier than that. He
thinks Goebbels is the soul of reason, a great intellectual, a philosophical and creative genius whose visions are frustrated only by unfortunate circumstances. Making it even funnier is that van
Oven himself shows few
signs of being exceptionally stupid. Like his boss, he was able and industrious. He didn’t miss a trick. All he missed was the point.

If we ever doubted that Goebbels did the same, the evidence is here. Goering knew that the game was up
when the first P-51 Mustang long-range escort fighter appeared over Berlin. Even Himmler started looking for a way out. But Goebbels kept the faith. Though finally it got to the point where not
even he could keep his faith in victory, he still kept his faith in Hitler. Even as it became clear that the insurmountable obstacle to any political solution was the existence of Hitler himself,
it never occurred to Goebbels that his loyalty to Hitler could be abandoned. After the attempted coup of July 20, 1944, it was suggested to Goebbels that the cause might still be saved if Hitler
could be sidelined in favour of a Goebbels–Himmler duumvirate. Though Goebbels held Himmler in high respect (“immaculate,” “a paragon of character”—vol. 2, p.
301) he could see no choice: he was for Hitler, even if it meant that Germany and Hitler would go down together. As the end neared, the only reproach Goebbels made against Hitler was that the
Führer had not been sufficiently true to himself, having allowed himself to be surrounded by a gang of opportunists, time-servers and mediocrities. There was certainly some truth in that.
Goebbels had good reason to think of himself as the genuine Nazi article. The comedy lies in his unintentional revelation of what being a genuine Nazi entailed. One thing it entailed was a huge,
incapacitating overestimation of the world’s tolerance for Nazi policies of territorial aggression and mass murder. Goebbels was right to believe that Stalin threatened civilization in the
West with a similar disaster. But he was wrong to believe that the Western allies, when they realized this, would see Nazi Germany as a bastion against the threat. He couldn’t let it occur
to him that the unlikely global alliance against Nazi Germany was held together by the existence of Nazi Germany itself, and would be maintained until Nazi Germany was gone. For him it was a
thought too simple to be grasped. He was too clever for that.

Goebbels’s cleverness was diabolical. Faithfully transcribing the master propagandist’s torrential paroxysms
of inspiration, von Oven was right to be awed. The man who invented Horst Wessel (a Nazi thug beaten to death by Communists, Horst Wessel was turned by the creative staff in Goebbels’s
office into the hero of a song) never ran out
of ideas. But the diabolical cleverness all served a self-deception. In September 1944 we find the Minister (von Oven always
calls Goebbels the Minister or the Doctor) favouring his assistant with a long tirade about how the situation could be saved if only he, instead of Ribbentrop, were in charge of foreign policy.
“I would work in both directions,” Goebbels explains. “The English way of thinking is congenial to me. I could bring into play my good and friendly connections with many
important Englishmen. But I would also start talking to the Bolsheviks. It is not for nothing that I count as the representative of our party’s left wing. What possibilities! What
visions!”
Der Minister seufzt und lehnt sich in seinen Sessel zurück
(vol. 2, p. 145). The Minister sighed and leaned back in his chair.

Once again, what makes it funny is that there was something to it: just not enough. Before the war,
Goebbels had indeed charmed the pants off many of the visiting Englishmen: he had long heart-to-hearts with the Duke of Windsor, Sir John Simon and Lord Halifax. Even Beaverbrook, later
tiresomely active on Churchill’s behalf, had seemed to understand Germany’s sacred mission against Bolshevism. But Goebbels could never grasp that everything was transformed from the
moment Churchill took office. The accommodating opinions of all these influential people either had ceased to matter or had changed, so that now, while they might all have been variously
influential, they were united in having no power to favour Germany even if they had wanted to. Predictably, Goebbels’s interpretation of this otherwise unaccountable turn-up for the books
was that a small, Jewish-inspired clique had taken over.

On the question of the Jews, von Oven does his best to employ the soft pedal on the Minister’s behalf. Even in
post-war Argentina, where Nazi refugees could voice their old opinions virtually unchecked, it was thought prudent to go easy on the mania. But a true mania has a way of seeping through any
amount of reasoned argument, and so it proves here. Though von Oven’s post-war preface to the complete work assures us that he had never known anything about gas chambers or exterminations,
in the body of the transcript the guileless amanuensis can’t hide even his own real opinions, so his master’s are bound to come out eventually. On October 3, 1943, von Oven delivers
himself of the prediction that some of the Nazi hierarchs will soon start looking for
alibis: “they will manufacture a connection with some resistance group, or they
will pretend that they helped some Jew (
etwa einen Juden
) escape from Germany.” Now why should some Jew have wanted to do that? In volume 2 von Oven
lets the Minister, in his role as Doctor of all the arts, rave on for three solid pages about the slyness with which the Jews pulled off the confidence trick called Modern Art, but von Oven is
still careful to confine the discussion to aesthetic matters. On a later page, however, both he and the Minister stand revealed as fully aware of what has been going on. Goebbels
“wonders” if Himmler, fine fellow though he is, might not have let the concentration camps (in German,
Konzentrationslager
, or KZ) get a little
bit out of hand. Previously, says the Minister, one was able to assume that the conditions in the KZs, “though they might have been hard, were correct and humane. Hard work, strict
discipline, but everything that a man should have: adequate food, medical care, even some entertainment.” The Minister goes on to lament, however, that under wartime conditions the KZs
might have become a touch less entertaining than they used to be. “Just imagine how it would look if the camps in their present condition are discovered by the enemy!” In that case,
predicts the Minister, even the German people will say no more about the blessings that Germany has enjoyed since 1933: blessings which have ensured that even during the war there has been
“no unrest, no strikes, no uprisings, no rowdies, no Jews. . . .” At which point, there is no more game to give away.

There is a kind of poetry to it: the poetry of evil, a destructive lunacy so fluent that it soars to the level of the
creative, as if Mephistopheles, as well as appearing in
Faust
, had actually written it. Compared with Goebbels, Hitler himself was earthbound. With the aid
of Albert Speer, Hitler conjured gargantuan visionary cities to be made real in brick and marble, but he would never have thought of a concentration camp that provided entertainment along with
the adequate food. Goebbels really was some kind of artist, which is why he should interest us: even more than Speer, Goebbels was the Nazi who talked the talk of an intellectual. As for the way
he walked the walk, in von Oven’s masterpiece the Minister’s bad foot goes largely unremarked. As we can tell from Goebbels’s diaries, it never went unremarked in the mind of
the man on whom a cruel trick of birth had inflicted it. Byron’s bad
foot, we are told, did not make him limp: but he might have felt as if it did. Goebbels’s bad
foot never let him feel any other way. Only one thing could make him forget it. His measure of a suitably passionate mistress was how she could liberate him from that dreadful awareness. “I
forgot my foot.” Goebbels, though always a family man, awarded himself an artist’s privileges with women, and his position of power ensured that he did not have to restrict himself to
the demimonde—where, indeed, he got so involved with an actress that Hitler had to call a halt to the affair.